Cross Keys sits along State Route 276 south of Harrisonburg in Rockingham County. The name comes from the keys-and-bow tavern sign that hung at the crossroads in the early 19th century - a not-uncommon naming convention for rural Virginia communities. The land surrounding the crossroads has been farmed for generations: limestone soil, gently rolling, productive. From the air, the community is barely a community at all - a few houses, the cemetery, the road junction. The Shenandoah Valley spreads in every direction. Massanutten Mountain rises to the north and east; the Allegheny Front lies to the west; the Blue Ridge edges the eastern horizon.

On June 8, 1862, two days after the small skirmish at Good's Farm that killed Turner Ashby, Cross Keys became the site of a much larger Civil War engagement. The Battle of Cross Keys was a Confederate victory in Stonewall Jackson's celebrated Valley Campaign. Union General John C. Fremont's force - about 11,500 men - met Confederate division under General Richard Ewell, about 5,800 men, in fields and woodlots around the crossroads. The Union attack was poorly coordinated; the Confederate defense, anchored by veterans of earlier Valley battles, held and counterattacked. Casualties on both sides numbered in the hundreds. Jackson's Valley Campaign that spring continues to be studied at military academies as a model of how a smaller force can defeat larger forces through speed and concentration. Cross Keys is one of the campaign's victories. The battlefield is partially preserved by the American Battlefield Trust.

Ananias Davisson (1780-1857) was a printer and singing-school teacher from the Shenandoah Valley who collected hymn tunes and folk songs and published them in shaped notation - a system in which each note of the scale has a distinctive head shape, making sight-singing more accessible. His Kentucky Harmony, published in 1816, was the first shape-note tunebook produced in the South. The title was geographic in origin - many of the songs he had collected came from Kentucky and Tennessee, where he had traveled to teach singing schools - but the tradition he helped seed took root from the Shenandoah Valley south through Appalachia and the Deep South. Sacred Harp singing, Christian Harmony, the entire surviving tradition of shape-note congregational singing - they all trace lineage back through Davisson's work.

Davisson is buried in the Cross Keys cemetery. Each year, the Northern Shenandoah Valley All Day Shenandoah Harmony Singing - a daylong event that uses the modern Shenandoah Harmony tunebook, which republishes many of Davisson's compositions - ends with a procession to the cemetery. The singers gather around the headstone and sing Davisson's hymn Retirement at his grave. The hymn is in a minor key, sung in four parts, and shape-note singers do not perform - they sing for themselves and the room (or in this case, the cemetery air). Audio recordings of the graveside singing exist, and they preserve something unusual: a living musical tradition acknowledging its first publisher, two centuries on, in the small place he came from. The crossroads is quiet most of the year. Once a year, in a particular hour, it is full of harmony.